SearXNG

What It Is

SearXNG running on the homelab at search.nexusno.de. It’s a metasearch engine — it takes your query, sends it to multiple search engines (Bing, Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo, etc.), aggregates the results, and shows them without tracking.

The browser is pointed at it instead of Google or DuckDuckGo. Same experience, no telemetry.

How It Works

SearXNG sits between the browser and the search engines. When you search:

1. The query goes to SearXNG
2. It forwards to multiple engines simultaneously
3. Results come back, get deduplicated, and ranked
4. You see the aggregated results

The caching layer (Valkey) speeds up repeated searches. The Docker container runs on the homelab and Caddy proxies it with a public domain.

What Works

• Bing — works fine, returns decent results
• Wikipedia/Wikimini/OpenLibrary — instant, accurate for factual queries
• DuckDuckGo — sometimes blocked or rate-limited

What Doesn’t

The homelab’s datacenter IP (49.207.4.55) gets blocked by most major engines. Google, Brave, Startpage, and Qwant all refuse to serve results from this IP range. That’s the tradeoff — self-hosted means you’re at the mercy of each engine’s IP reputation system.

It’s not a perfect replacement for Google, but for daily use it’s good enough. And when it’s not, I can always use the browser search directly.

Why Bother

Every search query sent to Google or Bing is logged, profiled, and potentially used for ad targeting. SearXNG strips that layer out. You still get the search results, but the middleman doesn’t know who you are or what you’re looking for.

For the price of a Docker container and a domain name, that’s worth it.